News

BEAN researchers Barbara Horejs and Bogdana Milić have publishd an article in the Journal of World Prehistory on the Neolithisation of the eastern Aegean as seen from the focal site of Çukuriçi Höyük. Bogdana Milić's striking photo of an obsidian cache was selected as the cover for the December edition of the journal.

A preview of a forthcoming article by the BEAN consortium has been posted to the BioRxiv preprint server. Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans, by Zuzana Hofmanová and Susanne Kreutzer et al., demonstrates a direct genetic link between Mediterranean and Central European early farmers and those of Greece and Anatolia, extending the European Neolithic migratory chain all the way back to southwestern Asia.

BEAN researcher Zuzana Fajkošová has been selected to join the Gutenberg Academy for Young Researchers, an honor reserved for up to 25 of the most promising PhD candidates at JGU Mainz. The Academy was created to support the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and the professional and intellectual development of its members.

A study combining ancient DNA analysis and computer simulations conducted by members of the BEAN ITN has uncovered evidence for strong positive selection on genetic variants associated with lighter skin, hair, and eye color in prehistoric Europeans. This selection was still operative relatively recently in human prehistory - within the last 5,000 years - and is one of the factors responsible for the wide variation in pigmentation observed in modern Europeans.

BEAN researchers at UCL, together with their colleagues, have used archaeological data, radiocarbon mesaurement distributions, and model-based computer simulations to demonstrate that the introduction of agriculture into Europe was followed by a boom-and-bust pattern in the density of regional populations.

Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-Holocene Europe

The research conducted by the BEAN and LeCHE ITNs into the origins of the European Neolithic, demographic change, and gene-culture co-evolution has been featured in the latest (1 August) issue of Nature.